Revolution! The Explosion of World Cinema in the 60sby Peter Cowie 296pp, Faber, £20

Which decade was cinema's golden age? The current consensus among the chaps who arbitrate these things seems to be the 1970s. In Revolution! The Explosion of World Cinema in the 60s, Peter Cowie argues that the real bonanza happened in the decade before. It was in the 60s that the New Wave (or, as Cowie prefers, Nouvelle Vague) of French and Italian directors rewrote the rule book. The premiere of Jean-Luc Godard's first feature film was "an event as momentous as the first performance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in 1913, or the publication of Joyce's Ulysses in 1922". It inaugurated a worldwide "film-making frenzy" that shook the cinematic establishment. Hollywood had no choice but to adopt the innovations of these low-budget, unsentimental, subversive, politically abrasive movies made by novices. "These directors," Cowie asserts, "together unleashed a movement as revolutionary and enlightening as the Impressionist upheaval in pictorial art in the 19th century."

Titanic claims indeed, but three troublesome truths spoil the fun of Cowie's thesis. First, cinema attendances fell calamitously throughout the 60s. Movie theatres were closing down everywhere as television sets infiltrated more and more homes. While the music scene underwent a genuine popular revolution, with millions of people embracing the experiments of the Beatles, the movies lost their grip on the masses.

Second, only a very small proportion of 60s mainstream film-makers can be said to have been influenced by the work of the non-conformists Cowie celebrates. The big commercial successes of the era - the James Bond flicks, the Neil Simon comedies, the Disney capers, the Carry On franchise and so on - owed nothing to the auteur theory or Marxist dialectic. Indeed, Cowie's revolution and the marketplace seem to have existed in separate universes. The 1977 infantile Star Wars would transform the film-making landscape much more than any New Wave classic.

Third, many of the movies that Cowie's favourite film-makers recall with greatest excitement were made in the 50s, a period he dismisses as complacent, sanitised and oozing artifice. Cowie's explanation for the superb films produced in this supposedly barren time by Welles, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Bergman, Wajda, Chabrol, Malle, Fellini and Resnais is that they "looked forward" to the 60s.

Throughout Revolution!, Cowie conflates a reasonable claim - that film-makers in the 60s had greater freedom to explore sexual and political themes than their predecessors - with the dubious conclusion that the films they made were hugely more interesting. I happen to agree that they were, but if I didn't, this book would do little to convince me. Cowie surveys the minutiae of optical mono soundtracks encoded with A-type noise reduction, the merits of "self-blimped" cameras like the Éclair Cameflex, the complexities of government funding, the gossipy distinctions between Champs-Elysées and Left Bank intellectuals, and so on. Far less attention is given to the actual films; Cowie seems to take it for granted that his readers are intimately familiar with them. He seldom takes time to explain exactly what was so good or new about a particular movie; more often his comments nod towards a vast body of received wisdom that exists somewhere outside the frame. Having seen most of Godard's films, I think I know what is meant by "La Chinoise gave vent to a harshness that had not been discernible in Godard before," but only God knows what a neophyte would make of this unelaborated remark.

Cowie cautions that Revolution! does not pretend to be a comprehensive overview. "This book thrives, if it thrives at all, on interviews with some of the period's most influential film personalities." That "if" raises the awkward question of how significant Cowie's interviews really are. Of the seven most prominent European film-makers of the period, only Resnais is here; Godard, Truffaut, Fellini, Antonioni, Polanski and Bergman evidently got away. One British director who really ought to have been interviewed but who, deplorably, isn't even mentioned is Peter Watkins, whose The War Game and Privilege are among the era's most powerful, innovative and enduringly disturbing films.

Because Revolution! presents neither an overview for the general reader nor any radical reinterpretations for the cognoscenti, its interviews are indeed its main attraction. Most of them are amiable, intermittently fascinating, well worth reading. The Resnais interview is especially good, as is the lively conversation with Richard Lester. Predictably, though, Cowie's old troupers have come to feel that when they were young and full of juice, cinema was in an unprecedented state of vigour. A few hard questions and a bit more contextualising would have helped sharpen the soft-focus, elegiac quality of these reminiscences.

Is Revolution! intended as a scholarly work, or as a walk down memory lane? Cowie can't quite decide, vacillating between argument and autobiography. Although this is not a problem in itself, Cowie's attempts to blend the two functions don't always come off. Recalling his personal epiphanies, he tends to hide behind such flimsy constructions as "One had the notion that... " and "Somehow, one was more moved by... " Combine this with the inarticulacy of some of his interviewees ("When we saw Loves of a Blonde at the Berlin Festival in 1966... Wow!"), and Revolution! starts to resemble those ubiquitous pop memoirs that stress how groovy everything was but lack the perspective to communicate with anyone who wasn't there.

Despite its air of universality, Revolution! is a blokey book about blokey things. When Cowie describes Antonioni's films as "an acquired taste, much like Chinese porcelain, Dos Passos, Webern, Kandinsky and the very dry martini," the spectre of Hugh Hefner looms. Volker Schlöndorff has fond memories of hanging out with "all the guys from Positif" (a film-crit magazine): "There were two ciné-clubs - the Cine Qua Non, and then the Studio Parnasse, on Tuesday nights, where Monsieur Cheray conducted quizzes, and usually Bertrand Tavernier knew the answers and got a free ticket for the next weekend."

With all this Hornbyesque camaraderie, it's hardly surprising that the decade's few female film-makers get short shrift. Agnès Varda is treated with impeccable respect, but Mai Zetterling's ground-breaking feminist films are scorned as "lacking in humour", Marguerite Duras is discussed only as Resnais's screenwriter (she made films of her own), Yoko Ono is mentioned only as an adjunct to John Lennon, and Liliana Cavani - a "revolutionary" film-maker if ever there was one - is overlooked altogether.

I have read Revolution! twice, nagged by the qualm that my criticisms may be too harsh. Cowie is a sincere lover of good films, and over the past 40 years he has done much to keep them alive (even today, his essays are often to be found in DVD re-releases of neglected masterpieces). However, he makes himself look unnecessarily pretentious in Revolution!, never referring to a director's world-view if he can slip in "Weltanschauung" instead, always referring to Breathless as A Bout de Souffle, and puffing out phrases like "beneath the veneer of liberation there lurked an empty void". You end up wondering how long you could have stayed in one of his cherished film clubs ("seething cauldrons of debate", apparently) before drifting off.

Ultimately, a book about old movies is only useful if it motivates readers to seek out the movies, watch them, and think deeply about what they offer. I doubt if Revolution! will achieve this in the case of Godard, Truffaut and the rest of the "major" players. Their importance is taken for granted, alluded to rather than illuminated, frozen in history. An intelligent young reader who is ready to look beyond chrome-plated garbage like The Matrix or Terminator 3 would not be able to glean enough from Cowie's account to guess whether Point Blank or Alphaville might provide a thrilling alternative.

Revolution! is illustrated with some excellent photographs, favouring shots in which the directors are communicating with the actors or other crew members. A particularly charming snap captures Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann teasing a rare, shy smile from Ingmar Bergman. Not exactly worth the price of admission alone, but close. Cowie also takes commendable care to describe some all-but-forgotten films - Andrzej Munk's Passenger, Marco Bellocchio's Fists in the Pocket, Kevin Brownlow's It Happened Here - which sound so good I'm determined to track them down. Perhaps this is the true legacy of all those mêlées and manifestos: individual film-lovers curious to see, or make, better films than the local movie house is showing. A modest, almost invisible revolution, recurring in every decade, for as long as movies continue to exist.

Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White is published by Canongate.